Eye-on-Retail Daily Tipsheet Archives

Target CEO to testify in Washington against border adjustment tax by Kavita Kumar, Maya Rao & Jim Spencer at Star Tribune. “Cornell will appear Tuesday at a House Ways and Means Committee hearing titled “Increasing U.S. Competitiveness and Preventing American Jobs from Moving Overseas.” Other speakers include the chief executive of Archer Daniels Midland, a big exporter that backs the plan, and former Wal-Mart CEO Bill Simon.”Read more

…Target officials have held more than 200 meetings with congressional staffers and lawmakers, and Cornell has met with 30 lawmakers to try to persuade them to abandon the tax proposal at Reuters.Read more

Walmart announces guaranteed pay for military workers by Jackie Wattles at CNN Money. “So even when a worker is on a military assignment, they’re now guaranteed to earn at least as much as they would working as a civilian at Walmart. The policy covers any military assignment from three days up to five years.”Read more

Trio faces consequences after scamming Amazon out of $1.2 million by Rich Van Wyk at WTHR 13 NBC. “Court documents say the Finans met Glumac in parking lots. They handed over big plastic tubs full of perfectly new, perfectly good merchandise. Glumac allegedly paid the couple more than half a million dollars, and sold the electronics for $900,000 to a New York company.”Read more

A Look at the Gas Stations of Tomorrow by Sarah Kent at Wall Street Journal. “Fifteen years ago it was just fuel,” says Alex Jensen, vice president for BP’s retail arm in Europe. Now, in the U.K., half of BP’s customers don’t even fill up when they visit a station, but just come in to buy food, she says.”Read more (subscription)

Amazon’s Latest Market Disruption: 1.7 Million Free Bananas by Laura Stevens at Wall Street Journal. “Most Amazonians like them. Other workers say it is now hard to find bananas in stock at nearby grocery stores. And some eateries in a two-block radius of the stands are feeling squished.”Read more (subscription)

The Future of Whole Foods Isn’t About Groceries by Craig Giammona at Bloomberg. “He got all the hard things right over the years, but he didn’t get the easy stuff right,” Kantor said. “There hasn’t been laserlike focus in a long time.”Read more

Postmates CEO will testify before Congress about the promise of robots and drones by Megan Rose Dickey at TechCrunch.Read more

Warby Parker Grew to $250 Million in Sales Through Disciplined Growth. Now It’s Time to Get Aggressive by Tom Foster at Inc.Read more

There Aren’t Enough Slaughterhouses to Support the Farm-to-Table Economy by Deena Shanker at Bloomberg. “In 1967 there were 9,627 livestock slaughtering establishments in the U.S…By 2016, there were only about 1,100 federally inspected meat and poultry slaughterhouses in the country…Volume sales for free-range meat..was up 26.9 percent in 2016, while conventional was down 0.5 percent, according to data from Nielsen Fresh.”Read more

Scientists have found a way to photograph people in 3D through walls using Wi-Fi by Dave Mosher at Business Insider. “The applications for Holl’s Wi-Fi holography, he says, are pretty expansive. Adding an array of reference antennas, say, inside a truck, might help rescue workers detect people in rubble left by an earthquake — or spy agencies see whether anyone is home. “You could probably use a drone to map out the inside of an entire building in 20 to 30 seconds,” he said.”Read more